Depends on the person and the conversation:
“Why does Hawaii have interstate highways?”
“Why did kamikaze pilots wear helmets?”
“Where are all the baby pigeons?”
“What is a mojo anyway?”
“Why does sour cream have an expiration date?”
“Why is shit brown?”
(Some of these are from the books, but hey, if I get them interested and thinking, I’ve done part of my job. If I eradicate any ignorance, an angel gets his/her wings.)
I second this one. The part about the jewlers saws does it for me. I also like the one about eating placenta.
I’m not as stupid as you look.
I end up using 2 questions, just to explain the breadth of topics discussed.
Why are there interstate highways in Hawaii?
Does a pig have a corkscrew shaped penis?
I have found that most of life’s questions fall somewhere in between those two.
Depends on to whom I’m talking.
If I know the individual and know they can tolerate off-color material, I’ll use the “calories in an ejaculation” example.
Otherwise, I go with an innocuous alternative that nonetheless exemplifies what I think of as the Straight Dope’s genius: Here’s a piece of information that you didn’t know you didn’t know, and explains a question you didn’t know you had, but that provides an illuminating “Ah!” and gets filed away. To wit, why did frozen orange juice cans have the plastic tear-off strip that released the end of the can many years before frozen lemonade cans introduced the same feature?
As far as the fascination of the message boards, I use the thread from maybe a year ago, “How to engineer a train-sized cockroach,” as my best generic example of why this place is so cool.
What is the Korean grocery store question?
Catherine and the horse!
Caloric content of sperm, kamikaze pilots wearing helmets, Schrodinger’s cat and … crap, there’s one more…
Ah, hell. Interstates in HI is as good as anything else.
hate to be unoriginal, but the caloric content of sperm is the one that I usually use as an intro.
The question re: all of the Chiinese people jumping off chairs at the same time. That one, and Cecil’s answer, sums it all up for me and is, I think, representative of the place.
The one about the gerbils “And then he lists everything that’s been taken out of where the gerbil was. After reading that, you’ll never look the same way again at a bottle of Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup.” And the person is totally nonplussed.
To explain the SDMB, I say that someone once said “That’s digusting. Is anything too sick for you people to discuss.” And someone replied “Too sick, no. Too stupid, yes.” That says it all.